That chart is provided for free on a website, you just have to know where to look! I think it is updated nightly... Those 3 red arrows in June-July REALLY said sell oil!: http://metastocktools.com/MACDH/Oil.png Oil promptly dropped 60 bucks before any blue arrow showed up...
I'm sensing a move back to 1070 over the next week or two. A massive short squeeze to go along with one of the most massive drops in history. It could go higher, but this is the first area I'll be looking to get short for the next move down. Its important to remember that S/R levels work better for catching retraces than calling the end of a strongly impulsing trend. IMO a long-term bottom is a long ways away for the US indices... but that's not to say there won't be plenty of playable bounces.
I agree, consolidation and upwards drift over the next few weeks. But at some point there will be another big leg down. I'm guessing terrible holiday sales, along with a high-profile BK or two, could be the catalyst.
This week witnessed the continuation of the great decline of 2008, what many have called the end of free market capitalism as we know it. Historic Volatility characterized this weekâs Market Behavior. Five years ago, Warren Buffett commented that derivatives were 'financial weapons of mass destruction, carrying dangers that, while now latent, are potentially lethal. The impact of the endless array of exotic derivatives has now created a freeze on global credit. One prominent financial figure, however, has long thought otherwise. And his views held the greatest sway in debates about the regulation and use of derivatives - exotic contracts that promised to protect investors from losses, thereby stimulating riskier practices that led to the financial crisis. For more than a decade, the former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan played the role of the leading proponent for Wall Street derivatives, fiercely arguing before Senate Banking Committee in 2003 whenever Congress questioned the nature and regulation of derivatives. Greenspan testimony: 1.) What we have found over the years in the marketplace is that derivatives have been an extraordinarily useful vehicle to transfer risk from those who shouldn't be taking it to those who are willing to and are capable of doing so. 2.) We [the Federal Reverse] think it would be a mistake' to more deeply regulate the contracts, he added. Theoretically intended to limit risk and ward off financial problems, the contracts instead have stoked uncertainty and actually spread risk amid doubts about how companies value them. Many economists have stated that had Greenspan acted differently during his tenure as Federal Reserve chairman from 1987 to 2006, the current crisis might have been averted. The current financial crisis occurred because the financial wizards of Wall Street believe the most implausible idea. In what they thought was a moment of sheer genus, the Wall Street wizards conceived that the financial sector could get rich by lending money to people who couldn't pay it back and selling those loans to unsuspecting investors around the world. In order to sweeten up the deal, they paid huge fee to the credit rating agency to disguise their sub-prime loans as AAA rated paper and invented bogus insurance policies, called credit default swaps to conceive institutional clients that if the loans went bad they would get back their principle. With the scheme worked out, they set about to market it, by luring the all to gullible American consumer into to believing they could go on forever spending money they did have on things they didnât need. Why they ever got the President to tell the nation consumerisms was downright patriotic. And there you have it; simple stated the greatest Ponzi scheme ever portrayed on the world stage. We the American people must take credit for this Ponzi scheme that our financial system created and perpetrated. Denial of the facts will not serve our national interest. Acceptance of the facts will make it possible for us to put an end to it. The choice is ours. We either get our heads around whatâs going on in our world and figure out how we, its citizens can shape it for the better or Ogilvyâs view of our world will prove right. Ogilvy said power is in advertizing. Ogilvy worked with the Intelligence Service at the British Embassy in Washington. He analyzed and made recommendations on matters of diplomacy and security. Ogilvy extrapolated his knowledge of human behavior from intelligence to nationalism to consumerism. Ogilvy research was picked up on by the Eisenhower Psychological Warfare Board who used his techniques of field secret successfully in Europe during the last year of the war. In his book, Confessions of an Advertising Man, Ogilvy state the function of advertising is to sell, and that successful advertising for any product is based on information about its consumer. The principle is simple, figure out what the person wants to believe and exploit it. Manipulate the personâs ego. We Americanâs want to believe they can have it all. Weâve been programmed to believe that all our lives. We are programmed to want instant gratification. We are programmed to constantly desire more and more; to consumer; to shop till we drop. Weâre been exposed to more commercial advertizing than any other human beings in history. Our life style, the fact that most of us spend hours watching TV then we do talking to the members of our familyâs, has shaped our minds into to a race non-critical thinkers; a nation who have forgotten how to think beyond the sound bite.
All this has made us gullible; gullible enough to believe that we could give up our manufacturing jobs and still live the good life. And now here we are; the baby boom generation and we have let ourselves get skewed. This week the nation sat by and watched as billions of dollars in equity disappeared before our eyes. The Blue Chip Dow 30, the NASDAQ Composite and the Broad Benchmark S&P 500 all sold off back to their bear market lows. The hallucinations of the Wall Street wizards turned into a bad acid trip. The immense worldwide credit bubble they created has burst. Now a huge anti-bubble is forming â in a Newtonian sense, it is likely to create an equal and opposite reaction. Those to whom we owe money, and god knows we are the greatest debtorâs nation on earth, are not likely to invest in our next sub-prime Ponzi scheme. I fear that we sown the seeds of our own demise. If and when the economies of the world can figure out how to get along without us, they will. Ten years ago, the giant Cayman Island hedge fund, called Long Term Capital Management hired a group of math wizards including several former university professors, including two Nobel Prize-winning economists, who dreamt up an all encompassing algorithm, a so-called the model of everything. Long-Term Capital Management commanded more than $100 billion in assets. Between 1994 and 1998 the fund showed a return on investment of more than 40% per annum. However, its enormously leveraged gamble with various forms of arbitrage involving more than $1 trillion dollars went bad, and in one month, LTCM lost $1.9 billion. The collapse of the Hedge Fund was American financial disaster, with significant international monetary implications, that put the entire financial system jeopardy. Prompted by deep concerns about LTCM's thousands of derivative contracts, in order to avoid a panic by banks and investors worldwide, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York stepped in to organize a bailout with the various major banks at risk. Wall Street feared that its unraveling could set off a systemic meltdown. So, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York called in the big financial houses to help with the rescue. It worked. The crisis was averted. LTCM's positions were liquidated in an orderly fashion. No firm had a closer view of Long-Term Capital than Bear Stearns, the broker that cleared its trades. And it was Bear that sounded the first shot in the current mortgage crisis. In summer 2007, amid a sharp rise in delinquencies on subprime mortgages, two hedge funds sponsored by Bear that invested in high-rated mortgage securities imploded. As foreclosures kept rising, other institutions suffered losses and the crisis spread. The leveraged exposure eventually took down Bear Stearns. However, the problem was much bigger than anyone expected or was willing to admit. The problem wasnât with one or two hedge funds. The whole financial system was involved. Trillions of dollars of new cash and credit are being pumped in the system. The result was that real estate prices were inflated to the point where genuine buyers, hard working people able to save a down payment couldnât afford to buy a home. All the while, good loans were being mixed with bad loans and were sold as AAA grade investment vehicles, backed by bogus overleveraged unregulated insurance policies, the so-called credit swaps. But this time, the fix doesn't seem to stay fixed. Bad positions can't be unwound in an orderly manner; there are too many of them. And it's not just a handful of speculators who are getting whacked: it's effecting the entire population of the United States of America, Great Britain and Europe. The Fed is buying assets that no one in their right mind would touch. Her majesty's government is now proprietor of 50 billion pounds worth of banking shares; the Bush administration, under the guidance of Treasury Sectary Paulson is preparing to enter the banking business too. But as trillions go in, trillions more leak out. So far this year, world equity markets have lost $20 trillion. U.S. property markets alone have lost $6 trillion over the last two years. It is not just a few investment decisions that are being corrected, in other words, it's the delusions of an entire generation. And why? Because after overleveraged liquidity comes the liquidation. After the outsized recklessness comes the appropriate regret. We have all lived through recessions (1973-74 and 1980-82). Recessions are simply part of the business cycle and government cannot repeal the business cycle. At some point the economic cycle will find a way to eventually get back to solid growth. This will not be the last recession. However, depressions are caused by governments. Depressions are the result major policy mistakes. Our government, not republicans, not democrats, the government made major policy mistakes some by deregulating mortgage lending. The government made major policy mistakes by allowing the five large investment banks to increase their leverage to 30 or 40 to one. The government made major policy mistakes by failing to oversee the rating agencies. Coming to terms with the cost of our mistakes is what we have to take away from the financial crisis of 2008. An immediate comprehensive plan is called for. Not to come up with a real solutions risks a much greater problem. To not take actions to stem the credit crisis would be that major policy mistake which would compound all the other mistakes.
Letting Lehman go under has brought to light just how pervasive the problem is. The consequences of allowing Lehman fail demonstrated the severity of the credit crisis. Based on the results of Fridayâs credit auction it is estimated that current exposure to risk will prove very costly. Many funds will be forced to dump assets to meet the payment demands if they haven't hedged. It may be too early to predict how much of that debt will eventually have to be absorbed by various government programs and capital infusions. But you can bet it will be a lot. Many firms have already write-downs their losses. According to the International Swaps and Derivatives Association Lehmanâs CDS holdings are likely to be sorted out with no failures. If that proven to be true then what the global financial markets went through this week was just a near death experience. Regardless, the CDS markets MUST be regulated. The Chicago Mercantile Exchange would be a good place for the CDS market to publicly trade. While there are always serious risk of loss in any exchange-traded market, there was no systemic risk. When publicly traded the value of their various securities are known to everyone. The market participants are assured by the exchange they will receive full value positions are redeemed. It was foolish to allow a market the size of CDS market go unregulated. Those who were lured to play that game got what they deserved. John Mauldin suggests that in the future the various main actors will look back at the failure of Lehman as the proverbial "last straw" for the unregulated CDS markets. The unregulated shadow CDS market has resulted in a credit freeze. The LIBOR index has historical traded in lock-step move with the Fed funds rate. The recent spike in the LIBOR rate has not responded to this week's Fed funds cut. The spreads are wider than ever. As Mauldinâs notes, the problem is not just the price of LIBOR. There is no trading at any price. The LIBOR market is a fiction today. And left unchecked, this lack of dealing with other banks will spread to letters of credit and the international trade markets. The G-7 group of nations is holding emergency meetings this weekend and reports are serious disagreements exist as to what to do. They cannot even agree on a press release. In an interview on PBS Television's Charlie Rose, Former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker urged all the G-7 nations to admit to the fact their own banks are going to need support. It is absolutely essential that the world's largest economies act together, and act together, says UK Chancellor of the Exchequer Alistair Darling. Governments must guarantee lending between banks; either by turning central banks into clearing houses for the loans or have governments take them over. The idea of governments taking over the Central Banking System is a change of dramatic portions. The suggestion indicates World Leaders acknowledge the system is at the point of no return. Itâs no longer about bailing out financial institutions. Governments are literally talking about taking over the Central Banking System to save the world economy. The fact is continued bank failures would guarantee a worldwide recession. The markets are not working. There are no signs that the markets will work. If this course continues history is likely to repeat itself. The last depression produced severe political backlash and a world war. We are living in extraordinary times. We are witnessing the collapse of free markets. Basically, the U.S. has had 30 years of Regan Style Milton Freeman laissez-faire capitalism where the preemies had been, government is the problem, do away with government regulation, stay aside and let the free market works. This week, what the Senior Bush called voodoo economic came back to haunt the nation. The extreme promise of supply-side economics has not materialized. In his 1962 book Capitalism and Freedom, Friedman advocated minimizing the role of government in a free market as a means of creating political and social freedom. This weekâs historical decline in the DOW proved that free market capitalism isnât working. Why has Free Market Capitalism failed? The simple honest answer is that those in positions of authority, government and corporate leaders, have exploited the laissezfaire capitalism, which have been implemented in monetary policy, taxation, privatization and deregulation around the globe, especially the administrations of Ronald Reagan in the U.S., Brian Mulroney in Canada, Margaret Thatcher in Britain, and Augusto Pinochet in Chile, and recently in Eastern Europe, for personal gain. Everything the neo-conservative Regan Style Milton Freeman free market capitalists believed has failed. Those in positions to exploit the public trust have wiped out the shareholders of America greatest companies, have taken huge sums of money and bailed out with their golden parachutes. While a few have becomes fabulously rich, the Milton Freeman Free Market Capitalistâs have now turned to government to bail them out. After hearing for years that government is the problem, that social programs donât work, these neo-conservative free market capitalistâs now tell us the only thing that can save the global economy is economic socialism with them as its primary recipient. You and I and our children and our childrenâs children will be paying for the cost of cleaning up the mess. This could not happen at a more inopportune time. At this time theirs is lack of leadership. It is difficult for people to know who to have faith in. Governmentâs efforts so far have had no effect. The FEDâs policies have done nothing to correct the situation. Most of us are inclined to think the markets should be allowed to work or simply want those who created the crisis to pay. Those of us who saw this crisis coming are frustrated that no one bothered to pay attention. Thereâs a lot of anger out there.